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 <br>

<small>Open Ontology Environment for Semantic Webbased e Commerce - Funded by FFG and BMVIT under contract number 812515 </small><br>

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<h1>myOntology in a Nutshell</h1> <br>

<b>Release Primer </b><br>

June 14, 2008 <br>

Katharina Siorpaes, Martin Hepp, Andreas Klotz, Michael Hackl, and the myOntology <br>

Consortium  <br>

www.myontology.org <br>

 <br>

<hr>
<A name=2></a> 
<h2>Introduction </h2>

myOntology is a community portal for creating and maintaining ontologies, based on the Wiki <br>

philosophy and supporting the community to (1) keep the system clean and (2) to find <br>
consensus on the vocabulary specifications. The main advantages of adopting the community <br>
paradigm for ontology engineering are:  <br><br>

<b>* Timeliness </b><br>

For a community, i.e. several individuals working towards a common goal, it is much easier (and <br>
cheaper) to keep up with the pace reality is changing and to capture the conceptual dynamics <br>
of  domain.  <br><br>

<b>* Cost </b><br>

As the burden of creation and maintenance is distributed among several participants, it is <br>
cheaper to have a community to collaboratively work on a specification of an ontology than for <br>
a small team of domain experts and ontology engineers.  <br><br>

<b>* Community Grounding </b><br>

In a community grounded approach, the ontologies are built and maintained by the actual user <br>
community, thus representing real community contracts. A community agreed specification of <br>
a conceptualization will more likely be accepted and further developed by the user community.  <br><br>

<b>* Expressivity </b><br>

Depending on the skills of the members of the development team, the traditional approach of <br>
building ontologies can yield all types of ontologies, ranging from flat taxonomies to highly <br>
axiomatized models. In an open approach where the community drives the creation and <br>
maintenance, not many individuals can be expected to have the skills to produce such <br>
axiomatized models. However, our assumption is that a community is able to produce <br>
lightweight ontologies, which will be described in detail in this paper.  <br><br>

<b>* Consistency </b><br>

Due to the small amount of contributors and the usually hierarchical approach in a small <br>
engineering team, ontologies are more likely to be consistent. However, inconsistency is harder <br>
to spot within a small team. In community grounded ontology engineering, inconsistency might <br>
occur due to many contributors with diverse backgrounds. However, inconsistency can be <br>
spotted more easily just like it is done  and that very successfully   in Wikipedia. <br><br><br>





The myOntology portal addresses the following nine issues that are visualized in Figure 1.  <br>
<ul>
 <li>

myOntology covers processes in ontology building, as previously described by Uschold and <br>
King. Additionally, it addresses lexical and multimedia enrichment in order to enhance <br>
understanding of ontology specifications. </li>

<li>

The metamodel behind myOntology is a sub set of OWL DL as a trade off between <br>
expressiveness and suitability for lay people. The ontology built in myOntology are intended <br>
to be lightweight.  </li>






 <li>

The editor makes use of the Wiki philosophy and exploits Web 2.0 technology for the easy <br>
to use user interface. Furthermore, it provides several visualization techniques in order to <br>
convey the intended meaning of ontologies. The user interface has been designed according <br>
to usability guidelines.  </li>

 <li>

myOntology will implement user roles in a rather lightweight manner, comparable to <br>
Wikipedia user roles.  </li>

 <li>

In order to keep the system clean, myOntology runs several algorithms in the background <br>
that track inconsistencies. In many cases, these findings need to be confirmed by the <br>
human user, which is done in the special page functionality.  </li>

 <li>

myOntology is currently being integrated with OntoGame, a series of games for generating <br>
semantic content. This allows an efficient combination of human and computational <br>
intelligence. The games paradigm will also be exploited to complement the background <br>
intelligence functionality by human intelligence.  </li>

<li>

myOntology adopts existing methods for versioning and alignment. Currently versioning is <br>
only done in form of a simple history and undo mechanism. Future extensions plan to <br>
implement a more sophisticated method. Furthermore, myOntology support the manual <br>
alignment of ontologies which will be extended by implemented (semi ) automatic <br>
methods.  </li>

<li>

myOntology implements several incentive structure that are also found in various Web 2.0 <br>
applications in order to motivate users to further contribute.  </li>

 <li>

myOntology exploits existing knowledge that is freely available on the Web in order to <br>
enrich ontology specifications.  </li>
</ul>
<img src="images/figure1.jpg">
<br>
<small>Figure 1. myOntology components</small><br><br>



<hr>
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<h1>Architecture </h1>

The current prototype implementation of myOntology can be found at <br>
http://myontology.deri.at/prototype, which runs a Tomcat 5.5 Web server. Storage of all data <br>
(both, administrative and ontological data) is done in a Sesame triple store. The application <br>
itself is implemented in Java and AJAX. Finally, the user interface is a HTML interface.  <br>


<img src="images/figure2.jpg">
<br>
<small>Figure 2. myOntology architecture</small><br><br>

 <br>



<h1>Features </h1>

In this section, we summarize the basic functionality of myOntology and provide a manual how <br>
to build an ontology using the system.  <br> <br>

<h2>0.  Registration and login </h2>

myOntology requires user to register to the system. Once a profile has been created, the user <br>
can immediately log in to the system using his credentials.  <br>

<h2>1.  Overview and start page </h2>

Users can navigate the system from the start page, which contains several elements: at the <br>
center are three tag clouds for navigating (1) ontologies, (2) concepts, and (3) relationships and <br>
attributes. The font size reflects the importance of the element for the community. A sidebar <br>
displaying the subsumption hierarchy of all concepts can be enlarged by hovering over it. The <br>
sidebar also allows changing the subsumption hierarchy by drag&amp;drop. The top menu contains <br>
the tools bar, which allows uploading ontologies and access  to the special page functionality <br>
which will be explained later.  <br>

The search box is the main navigation and creation tool: when looking for an element and <br>
starting to type, users are shown existing elements that might be relevant.  <br>



 <br>
<img src="images/figure3.jpg">
<br>
<small>Figure 3. Find while you type</small><br><br>


Users can also edit their profile in the top menu or log out.  <br>

 <br>
<img src="images/figure4.jpg">
<br>
<small>Figure 4. myOntology start page</small><br><br>


Besides the find while you type functionality, myOntology also offers an advanced search. <br>
The advanced search allows for searching (1) any element, (2) domain vocabularies, (3) <br>
concepts, and (4) attributes/relationships.  <br>


<img src="images/figure5.jpg">
<br>
<small>Figure 5. Advanced search</small><br><br>


Furthermore, users can perform a more structured search by querying the elements of the <br>
myOntology metamodel.  <br>

<h2>2.  Creating /editing a domain vocabulary </h2>

Before creating a new domain vocabulary, users are forced to check whether the ontology they <br>
are about to create already exists: they have to start typing and eventually in case there is no <br>
such ontology yet  click create new domain vocabulary.  <br>

The domain vocabulary editing and creation forms are the same: users can add a description, <br>
synonyms, images and videos, translations, tags, a seeAlso link, and concepts. Most of these <br>
attributes are enhanced by gather data from the Web, such as Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, <br>
Wordnet, etc.  <br>

 <br>
<img src="images/figure6.jpg">
<br>
<small>Figure 6. Domain vocabulary </small><br><br>



<h2>3.  Adding concepts </h2>

Concepts can be added either from domain vocabularies or from the start page. Similarly to <br>
domain vocabularies, concepts can be richly described using various lexical and multimedia <br>
resources.  <br>

 <br>
<img src="images/figure7.jpg">
<br>
<small>Figure 7. Concept  </small><br><br>


Additionally, users can manually create mappings between existing concepts using SKOS <br>
mapping relations equivalent, partly overlapping, narrower, broader. Attributes and <br>
relationships can also be added, as explained in the following section. Users can also create <br>
ontological instances, i.e. instances that are required for specifying abstract models. Finally, <br>
sub  and super concepts can be created or chosen.  <br>

<h2>4.  Adding attributes and relationships </h2>

Attributes or relationships of concepts can be specified in a similar manner.  <br>


<img src="images/figure8.jpg">
<br>
<small>Figure 8. Attribute   Relationship  </small><br><br>


<h2>5.  Import, export, freeze points </h2>

myOntology is an open environment with evolving ontologies. In order to enable reliable <br>
references, the system allows the creation of freeze points of domain vocabularies, i.e. stable <br>
snapshots of the current version of an ontology plus a URI.  <br>

 <br>
<img src="images/figure9.jpg">
<br>
<small>Figure 9. Freeze points  </small><br><br>


Additionally, the system allows to export the ontologies in OWL.  <br>

Users can upload ontologies to the system in order to further edit them using myOntology via a <br>
simple upload mask, available from the top menu Tools.  <br>

<h2>6.  History </h2>

myOntology logs all changes to all ontological elements in a history. This allows users to undo <br>
certain changes and go back to a previous version. This versioning mechanism is similar to <br>
Wikipedia's with the difference that myOntology does not only log changes for the ontology <br>
element but the precise attribute that was edited, i.e. the description or synonyms.  <br>


<img src="images/figure10.jpg">
<br>
<small>Figure 10. History   </small><br><br>


<h2>7.  Special pages and dynamic special pages </h2>

As already explained in the previous section, myOntology cleans the system in the background <br>
via algorithms that track inconsistencies or missing / obsolete information. This process is a <br>
combination of human and computational intelligence as the findings of those algorithms have <br>
to be confirmed by the human user.  <br>

Finally, the system also allows the specification of new queries in the dynamic special pages <br>
functionality.  <br>

 <br>
<img src="images/figure11.jpg">
<br>
<small>Figure 11. Special pages  </small><br><br>




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